The Vorrh

Island sirens who fluttered and coiled in the gleaming white of society’s grandest parties. Her attractiveness came from within and radiated her every movement with grace and charisma; not a polished diamond, but an energetic nugget of strength and robust dignity. Since then, she had been overwhelmed with money and grief. The wasting death of her only daughter and untimely demise of her husband left only her loneliness to break her, and her vast inheritance to haunt every hope of an afterlife.
    Sarah was the only benefactor of the fortune earned by the enormous success of the Winchester repeating rifle, the gun that ‘won the west’. It was a greatly evolved version of the clumsier Henri rifle, and a revolutionary design: a tubular magazine sat under the barrel and fed twelve rounds into the breech by means of an under-lever, which also acted as a trigger guard. The lever action carbine could be rapidly fired from horseback. The firepower and speed of delivery made it a superior weapon to all that had gone before it.
    It tidied away the few remaining tribes who refused to yield to the white invasion. The gun, and its heavier calibre brothers, cleared the plains of the buffalo and every other creature with a price on its tail or horn. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the northern army bought the gun in vast quantities and money gushed and splashed into the Winchester coffers. It shot one bullet per second, and possessed a trajectory that wiped out half a generation of neighbours and friends.
    Sarah’s tears never really ended. After the first five years, they simply turned inwards. Her eyes would well and weep inside her lids, hollowing the flesh beneath the fine skin of her cheeks and finding her throat, so that she might swallow down the wet pictures of little Annie wasting at her breast. The child had nothing except ferocious hunger and pain; between its skeleton and its skin, no flesh or fat grew.
    Almost fifteen years later, she would swallow her pain with the rotted lungs of her young husband, as disease ate him away. He, like his screaming daughter, shrivelled in her arms. It was said that she balanced precariously on the edge of madness at the beginning of the 1880s, but some kind of resilience kept her from stepping over its line. She wasn’t sure where it came from: it certainly wasn’t rooted in the mountain of money that grew behind her grief, for she had no interest in that; there was nothing it could buy and so it stockpiled, a burgeoning model of her ballooning anguish. There had to be a reason why so much horror had quenched so much joy; when she eventually found it, it was appallingly obvious.
    He had come to explain. With his pale smile and his gentle hands, she had no doubt that it was her husband being described, standing at her side, beyond the reach of her untrained eye. He was here to explain their evolution, and lay her personal guilt to rest: none of this was her fault.
    The medium held a handkerchief to her face as she spoke his words for him, consoling him and encouraging him to speak more clearly. He said, through her, that those who had been slain by the terrible weapon were vengeful and returning, that they followed the dollar line back to those responsible, and that she, by default, was the only one left. They had taken William and Annie (who were happily together on the spirit side), but their anger was not extinguished.
    Salvation was possible, and it had a physical form. Her husband told her to build a house, a mansion, for herself and the dead to cohabit; one large enough to accommodate every lost soul, before they came homelessly scratching at her existence. She must never stop work on this ambition, he warned. The house must continuously grow; if its expansion ceased, she would die, and they might never meet again on the other side.
    Sarah left the séance that day with hope and a purpose; after years of pain, she finally had something worthwhile to channel her money and energies into. She had been given a first deposit on a new life, a pilgrimage that would divert Leyland Stanford’s train lines to the building site of her new home in the west, and she thanked the medium for guiding her in the right direction. She employed an army of workmen day and night to construct a monstrous labyrinth of wood to hide herself in. Llanda Villa multiplied around her, its blind corridors and infatuation with the number thirteen snaking in all directions, funnelling the furious demons and